Gentle Ease Lecture
This lecture was about drawing and After Effects and there was many videos that were shown to us to show what we could do with drawing and After Effects. Personally, my most familiar way of working is physically and I especially enjoy drawing so this lecture instantly grabbed my attention.

Dryden Goodwin: Skill was the first example we were shown that really interested me. I like the fact the conversation between the people and the drawings are so heavily personal to each other and also illustrate the conversation so well by just capturing the essence of someone's appearance or an item that is involved in the conversation. It couldn't be reflected any better by using a different material. The looseness allowed it to be openly interpreted as well as move with the conversation.

Dryden Goodwin: Skill (2014) from Forma Arts on Vimeo.
I love this style of drawing and even composed a sketch of my own in his style to try and grasp this loose and incredibly textured way of drawing.

I really like the way the pen is used to allow the face to come alive with expression and I also like the way the video is composed.

The second video we were shown was by Johnny Kelly and it is called Forest: Just one day.

This was also all hand drawn, like Goodwin's pieces. 

Forest: Just One Day from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.
I like the hand-made look of this video and how it reflects the music so well. I feel like the video brings a whole new element and experience to the song. It looks very minimal but probably takes a lot of work to do and is executed beautifully. The shapes and objects on this paper-looking background move to the tone of the music and what the song is doing. This simplistic style also works well with the simple tune over the back of the song that is played almost throughout. I like the style this is drawn in and the way it flows together also.

The next video we watched was Flow by Jane Cheadle. This video was recorded within her own studio which makes it a personal experience.

flow from jane cheadle on Vimeo .
This video is basically an experiment with materials alongside music which is what the previous video did but this is done in a very different way which appears to use stop motion, and uses it well. It is amazing how the white lines appear to circulate on this black circle along to the music. This is a very textured and ambiguous piece and is incredibly beautiful although looks very complex. I like the way the circle appears to be animated although it is only a series of pictures. It is a very dramatic piece in black and white.

The next video that I found very interesting was Little Boy by Jordan Baseman.

Little Boy from Animate Projects on Vimeo.
This video is deliberately difficult to watch and has an incredibly powerful extract of an interview that introduces it. Watching this video is a highly intense experience of noise and colour which could be interpreted in a number of ways. The powerful thing is, although you want to stop watching it, it is still making you feel emotion and reflect on the short speech about 'the flash' at the beginning. Out of context, you would wonder what this meant and why it is so distressing. Within context. it is even more powerful. This piece is about the disaster in Hiroshima in 1945. The chilling thing about explaining the bombing as 'the Darkness' is almost what the rest of the video is expressing. This unknown and powerful darkness that was probably so intense and terrifying that it can be reflected through a disturbing collection of sounds and ambiguous images that appear on the screen. Ms Setsuko Enya recalled the devastating memory of the Hiroshima tragedy and this is how Jordan Baseman interpreted it.

We then looked at a music video created by Drew Tyndell that was called General Elekriks: Angle Boogie.

General Elektriks: Angle Boogie from Drew Tyndell on Vimeo.
This is a very handmade and energetic piece that looks like it was made quickly and loosely but it was actually made through a process called Rotoscoping which is an incredibly time consuming, frame by frame process. However, this creates an entirely different illusion of it being created quickly and with a lot of energy. This is a clever way of creating animation.

We then looked at more of Tydell's work and the series of 'Loop' videos he made which use a similar process and have a very similar style and energy. This ones called Loop 4:

Loop 4 from Drew Tyndell on Vimeo.
He has made several of these videos and they look effective played one after another

My Mother's Coat was the next video we watched which was made by 'Moth' and is a highly emotive animation.

My Mother's Coat from Moth on Vimeo.
This again is a very loose and reductive style of working which tells a story. which is very rich in emotion, through very little lines and symbols to represent what was being said in the poem. The sullen tone of the poem compliments the style of the animation. It then switches to photograph and real film of the author and the child that the poem is addressed to which makes it more emotive and is really the opposite to the incredibly minimal style that was before. Its important that the artist has interpreted the poem themselves before creating this piece which makes it personal to the artist and reflects what they feel about the poem, adding another level of depth and emotion to the animation.

The final video we were shown was Le Meurtre teaser by Tom Haugomat and Bruno Mangyoku.

LE MEURTRE teaser from tom haugomat & bruno mangyoku on Vimeo.
This another reductive piece of work but uses more block colour as well as using negative space effectively. Although its colourful and simple style, it is very dramatic.

Overall, this lecture was very interesting and it demonstrated to me the different ways to use after effects and different ways to incorporate physical drawing into animation. I am very interested in doing this in my work.

Typography 3:
In this workshop, we had to select a final typeface to take forward and create a sentence out of. I decided on this:

However, I wanted to make it more rounded and more even so I decided to take my time as well as experiment with different weights for my final typeface. This was the final result:

I tried to be exact in my letter spacing and also the sizes of the letters however, this is very hard to do freehand and I did struggle with achieving a perfect looking sentence. However, it has vastly changed from the draft of this typeface. I like the fact it is round and more friendly, but I am not happy with the 'i' as well as the 'q' and the 'b' because they look different and sloppier than the rest of the letters. I also struggled with the 'b' 'o' and 'q' because of the circular spaces within them. I am overall happy with my final result and definitely feel that a thicker weight looks better in comparison to the thinner weight on 'fox' but glad that I experimented with both. It could be neater and more precise and even more adventurous but I do like it as a basic looking typeface. 

Overall, I thought the typography tutorials were incredibly beneficial as I love working with pen and paper and it refreshed my drawing abilities. However, I do feel like my style, which is quite loose and freehand, does not compliment doing typography because it takes a lot of attention to detail. It did allow me to practise this way of working which is also very useful.  

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Cinema 4D:
This is the most challenging tutorial I have come across as I find the program highly complex.
The task was to generate a 3D name on Cinema 4D which I had trouble rendering at the end. I followed most of the steps well but if I missed one thing I found very difficult to catch up and find my place.

This is a portion of what I created. I managed to make a cube move backwards and forwards and added texture to objects. I also  made the lines of MOL appear smoothly. 

This command box shows what I did to the objects. Such as sweeping, adding light, bending objects and adding textures. This was a great introduction to the basics of Cinema 4D and I did enjoy it. I was happy that my animation worked although did have an issue when rendering it as the lighting was wrong. However, it did allow me to know some of the basics. 

I didn't follow the tutorial very well because of the complexity of the programme. However, I will look more extensively into Cinema 4D and improve my skills. This was helpful because it highlighted areas I need to improve on as well as revealed what I can possibly do with the programme. 

Photoshop creative workflow:
I find these sessions the hardest to follow and I don't achieve the level of work I would like to within the time I have. I have minimal experience with photoshop and am new to it this year, which is not the case for a lot of the other students. However, this tutorial helped me in some ways although I found it hard to keep up. We used artboards, RAW images and learnt how to layer over images.

Here, I edited an image that was flat and changed the colours. I was familiar with this tool and how to use it but was still useful to refresh my skills.

We then changed it into a monotone image and learnt how to do this so we could layer colour over it or add colour to the monotone picture. 

I added a blueish overtone on my image. This was also interesting to do as I had never done this before and was a good skill to know about. 

I then got a cityscape landscape to work on and this is where I expanded my skills even more. 

I then brightened up the image which revealed a lot of hidden detail compared to the image which was under exposed. Then, 

We then looked at removing large sections of the image by selecting areas of the photograph. When doing this, it doesn't work 100% of the time because of reflections but it is a good skill to know. 

We then learnt how to do this using a very simple line and gradient. It looked effective but was hard to achieve and I was unable to link the PS file to the AI file. However, I did learn a lot from this tutorial although it was difficult for me. 

This is my non-destructive self portrait using three layers. I used these three images:

Typography part 2:
This week we had to develop our previous typefaces and draw up rough alphabets and select the best option to carry over to task 3. I enjoyed this task and did manage to create a few typefaces that I was happy with.

This is the first rough alphabet I began to produce. I realised the letter sizes and spacing weren't right and scrapped this font as I didn't like the look of it either. However, I have a loose style and this really is apparent in this typeface. I decided to move onto a new alphabet. 

This style is vastly different and I was still to keen on how it looked. However, after some guidance, I started to measure letter sizes and spacing. After i got the hang of how to do this, I felt it made a big improvement to how my letters looked. I decided to move on from this and begin a new alphabet, working roughly and quickly to try and achieve a typeface i was happy with. 

I then created this the top typeface to elaborate on the previous font. I liked how this looked and liked the negative space within the letters. However, after a brief experiment with this, I moved onto a different font that had more in common with the first font I did. I liked this, however, it was suggested to not add the doted lines that went along the straight line of the letter. I did this but then preferred it with the line as I felt it was more unique. I enjoyed doing this one as it wasn't as tedious and let me work quickly and loosely. 

This is the final font I produced and the one that I'm most likely to take onto the final stage of the brief. It is clear and bold which I like. However, it needs to be tidied up and the letters aren't all the same size and not all space correctly.  

I did enjoy this task because it let me work loosely and quickly and explore a range of techniques and styles. I will have to work with more detail in the letters and be more careful with spacing and letter size to refine the font and conclude the brief.